Social Interaction -- Should You Script It?

Look around the subway car and notices those passengers under the age of 35. What percentages are listening to headphones?

Ever been to dinner with a someone under the age of 30 and they texted throughout the entire meal?

How about rode in a bus or even sat beside a person of this age in an airport?

I'm finding an increase in the inability of employees to handle complaints, cross-sell and deal with personal interaction with fellow employees, managers and customers. What should a company do?

Handheld video games, ipods and smart phones have removed a significant amount of social interaction. Obviously, this isn't only happening with the younger age groups, but the younger generations are the ones who have had these options available almost their entire lives. They are missing the development opportunity for critical social interaction skills.

Soon you will have employees who have communicated predominately through computers and texts their entire lives. In a social setting where they are not the center of attention they are usually absorbed by a game or phone or music and completely tuning out the world around them and focusing on the world in their hand.

How will these folks do with social conflict with fellow employees, managers and customers? No reset buttons here. You can't close the screen or turn off the electronic gadget when a customer is complaining about a problem they are having.

Interaction training

The social interaction that was once learned on the play grounds and during after school neighborhood pick up games has been replaced with structured play dates with friends and electronic games where opponents can literally be halfway around the world and is only known by the name on the screen. Not much socializing and learning to deal with people different from yourself.

Employers need to be training employees on the meaning of social interaction. During customer service training and sales training employers should actually create scripted responses to certain situations. During your training discuss the best response to customer complaints. Then have every attendee write it down. In fact, creating flash cards with scripted responses are a great start to teaching the words to use when interacting as a representative of the company.

The scripts are not intended to teach the employee not to think during such interactions, but it is a good way to get them to understand the right approach with people and how to structure proper communications with people.

Think this is a bit too simple? Take notice of how your interaction is with customer service representatives in the retail and food industry. Get back to me on that.